The biblical prophets and their historical personae have long fascinated readers of the Bible, scholars and non-scholars alike. They are dramatic; their words both condemn and offer hope; they are culture’s visionaries. However, some of the biblical prophets appear to align themselves closely to the power of the state and some are decidedly out of the state’s favour. In fact, how a prophet relates to the state is very often at the heart of the motivation for the prophet’s message. Enemies and Friends of the State: Ancient Prophecy in Context, edited by Christopher Rollston, is a collection of essays that seeks to tease out and explain this bipolar relationship of prophet and state. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by Ryan D. Schroeder, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

The notion of “scribal culture” has facilitated a novel phase in the study of biblical and ancient Near Eastern literature, signposted by works like David M. Carr’s Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (2005), Karel van der Toorn’s Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (2007), Eugene Ulrich’s The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Developmental Composition of the Bible (2015), and Sara J. Milstein’s Tracking the Master Scribe: Revision Through Introduction in Biblical and Mesopotamian Literature (2016).1Read the rest of this entry »

Göran Eidevall has contributed the new Amos volume in the expanding Anchor Yale Bible commentary series. This commentary is the successor to the original Anchor Bible commentary on Amos by Francis L. Andersen and David Noel Freedman (1989). The present volume is a considerable departure from the earlier work in focus, and will undoubtedly provide a good complement to Andersen and Freedman’s work, rather than replacing it. Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel L. Smith-Christopher has produced a new commentary on Micah in the Old Testament Library series. This commentary follows an earlier commentary on Micah in this respected series by James Luther Mays, published in 1976.1 The body of the text comes to 227 pages, the first forty-four of which are introduction.

Before the categories of “book” and “Bible” dominated the literary imagination, Mroczek asks, “What did this literary world seem like to Second Temple writers?” (4). How did the creators and users of literary artifacts organize and conceptualize writing? We note that this literary world of Second Temple Judaism is explicitly textual; Mroczek avoids the temptation to see orality as the only alternative to our familiar models of textuality: she explores literary modes that are “deeply, self-consciously textual, but shaped differently from our own” (5). Read the rest of this entry »

The past decade has yielded a small, yet robust crop of studies on food and drink in the Hebrew Bible. Andrew Abernethy’s contribution to this increasing yield looks at the role of food and drink in the literary structure of Isaiah, focusing on the sections that have been identified as major cruxes in the book and asking how food and drink contribute to Isaiah’s message.

Abernethy devotes the first chapter to surveying some of the recent scholarly approaches to the topic of food in biblical literature, and outlines his own method as a sequential-synchronic approach. The second chapter focuses on Isaiah 1 as an introduction to the whole book, looking at how food and drink function in its rhetoric. This study of Isaiah 1 sets the stage for later discussions on how these first food themes are fleshed out in Isaiah 2-35 (ch. 3) and 36-37 (ch. 4).

The development of the text of the Hebrew Bible has enjoyed a renewed interest in recent years. But whilst studies on the text of Scripture in the Second Temple period abound,[1] the period subsequent to it tends to be ignored. The reasons for this neglect are easy to see. The period between the Rabbis and the Masoretes is traditionally considered a “dark age” in the history of the biblical text. What is more, this era is commonly taken as one in which a single textual tradition (the Masoretic Text or MT) was dominant – in contrast to earlier eras, where textual fluidity and pluriformity prevailed.[2]Read the rest of this entry »

Avi Hurvitz’s latest contribution to scholarship is a Hebrew lexicon of a very different sort than scholarship is used to seeing. He has extracted a diachronic layer of Biblical Hebrew – Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH) – and collated all linguistic markers of that period, namely anything that marks LBH as distinct from what precedes it (Hurvitz’s Classical Biblical Hebrew or CBH). While it is not new to create a lexicon for a certain diachronic layer of Hebrew (see Clines Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, as distinct from corpus-based lexica such as most other lexica of Biblical Hebrew), it is rather innovative to create one that is dedicated only to what is new or in the stages of development during a specific historical stratum that is also corpus restricted (Late Biblical Hebrew, rather than early Second Temple Hebrew). Read the rest of this entry »

“It is fair to say that very few scholars who can write convincingly on wide questions of biblical interpretation and hermeneutic, as well as on general theology, also have the expertise to operate at this [linguistic] microscopic level, and to do so in a way that can command the interest of readers not themselves learned in this area” (vol. 3: p. 2)

This now complete set of Professor Barr’s essays is a formidable addition to any scholar’s library.The nearly 2000 pages of this collection speak to Barr’s prolific career of exploring the concentric concerns of Bible, theology, linguistics, exegesis, philology, Semitics, and other areas. As volume 2 of this set has previously been reviewed for this publication, I will focus my attention on volumes 1 and 3 at this time. The content of Barr’s articles are not in need of critical re-evaluation. Read the rest of this entry »

A Modern Grammar for Biblical Hebrew is a deductive introductory Hebrew grammar by Duane Garrett and Jason DeRouchie. It is divided into 41 chapters and 8 appendices. Accompanying the book is a CD containing a variety of teaching aids including audio files to assist in the learning of the pronunciation of the alphabet and vocabulary. There is also a workbook available to accompany the grammar, and Garrett has put together a blog to accompany the grammar, as well (see http://hebrewgrammar.sbts.edu/). The grammar is designed to be usable in several different ways for a two semester Biblical Hebrew course. What this means is that there are built into the organization of the material four potential stopping points, depending on the goals of a given Hebrew course. Read the rest of this entry »

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Biblical and Early Christian Studies

2019.9.9 | Jennifer Knust and Tommy Wasserman. To Cast the First Stone: The Transmission of a Gospel Story. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Review by Garrick V. Allen, Dublin City University. This meticulously researched and deeply engaging volume on the pericopeadulterae(PA) is a prime example of the value of collaborative research in the humanities, encompassing […]

2019.4.5 | Edward Lipiński. A History of the Kingdom of Israel. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 275. Leuven: Peeters, 2018. ISBN: 978-90-429-3655-3. pp. xii+209. Review by Kurtis Peters, University of British Columbia Histories of Israel have become commonplace. The topic of Israel’s history has always intrigued scholars and many have undertaken to reconstruct their own version of that history. […]

2019.1.2 | Rollston, Christopher, A. Enemies and Friends of the State: Ancient Prophecy in Context. University Park: Eisenbrauns, 2018. pp. X + 613. ISBN: 9781575067643. Reviewed by Kurtis Peters The biblical prophets and their historical personae have long fascinated readers of the Bible, scholars and non-scholars alike. They are dramatic; their words both condemn and offer […]

2018.12.13 | Göran Eidevall.Amos: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Yale Bible 24G. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. pp. xx + 292. ISBN: 978-0-300-17878-4. Reviewed by Kurtis Peters Göran Eidevall has contributed the new Amos volume in the expanding Anchor Yale Bible commentary series. This commentary is the successor to the original […]